A San Francisco anti-war group will protest UC Berkeley School of Law professor John Yoo’s continued employment by the campus at Friday morning’s law school commencement ceremony at the Hearst Greek Theatre.

Members of the Bay Area chapter of national anti-war group World Can’t Wait are calling for protesters to speak out and bring signs and orange ribbons — items that represent protest according to the SF Bay World Can’t Wait website — to distribute to graduates and their guests.

“John Yoo teaching constitutional law to the next generation of lawyers and judges is a perverse mockery of what a law school education should be,” said World Can’t Wait spokesperson Stephanie Tang in a press release. “Yoo’s infamous disregard for, and destruction of, basic legal principles under the U.S. Constitution and international law, including the Geneva Conventions, renders him unfit to teach.”

Yoo, who is also a former deputy assistant attorney general, came under heavy scrutiny for authoring memos to the Bush administration concluding that an interrogation technique must cause damage equal “to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function” to be considered torture.

A federal appeals court last Wednesday threw out convicted terrorist Jose Padilla’s lawsuit accusing Yoo of authorizing illegal interrogation methods, ruling that because the definition of torture remained unsettled at the time Yoo authored the memos, he is protected from such lawsuits.

“(E)veryone needs a hobby,” Yoo said in an email. “For denizens of Berkeley, protesting makes for a neat distraction from working.”

Having John Yoo as a law professor teaching constitutional law at Cal is makes a mockery of the entire justice system. What was Cal thinking when they hired this disgrace to the legal profession and judicial system. Justice is suppose to mean something. It certainly does not with Yoo on Cal’s faculty.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_WRACM77JT2RXUR3LMGDPPUGUYY Tony M

Your presence on this planet makes a mockery of humanity.

Calipenguin

How come the anti-war group does not protest Obama’s continued use of Predator missile attack drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen? Maybe only liberals are allowed to kill people. Conservatives are not allowed to even write about it.

wexit

Actually World Can’t Wait does protest Obama’s use of drones. Crimes are crimes, not matter who does them.